I thought this was a good book. The writer did a good job keeping the reader in suspense and wondering what was going on. I usually can figure out the plot early on but not with this book. There was enough mystery and suspense and an interesting story line for an enjoyable read.There was only one part of the story that the writer seemed to forget about at the end of the book. What about the subsidiary and the big software project being worked on that Don Seaton stumbled upon? I thought it would come up again at the end but it never did so I am not sure of the purpose. In fact it never came up again. The Aspen Account by Bryan Devore is a mystery story taking place in the state of Colorado. It follows the story of a man named Michael Chapman, a seemingly normal accountant at a firm in Denver, who is actually an operative for the Department of the Treasury. He is assigned to his friend's account following his mysterious death, and begins to unravel a huge fraud and the reasoning behind his friends death. The story starts off following a man named Kurt Matthews who is on vacation, skiing in the mountains of Aspen. Not much detail is given about who this man is, but he is killed off in the first few pages of the novel. This intense beginning hooks you onto the story and makes you want to find out the motive behind this seemingly innocent accountant's death. The story then shifts to Kurt's good friend and coworker Michael Chapman, who has recently made a large mistake on an account and was near getting fired, but caught a lucky, yet tragic, break when his friend Kurt dies. He is assigned to Kurt's account at a company called X-Tronic and begins to unravel a huge fraud with the company, along with the late Kurt's sister Sarah Matthews, who was the first to raise suspicion about the death of her brother. I really enjoyed this story, which kept me quite interested until the end and had many unexpected twists and turns of the plot near the end. I was a little worried about not understanding jargon about accounting, but the author did a nice job of putting it into terms the average reader would understand. The writing style was very easy to follow and kept me engaged and interested. A motif that I noticed was that he seemed to be quite good with imagery, describing the cold and the mountain scenery of Colorado, "as he sat gazing over the forty-foot drop, a cold gust brushed across his face and nearly blew the lit joint out of his gloved hand. He looked out over the evergreens and aspens sloping down below him." his images of the Coloradan mountains really brings me back to my multiple visits there. I also noticed that he seems to mention and describe the eyes of the characters in intense moments, “the stillness of this beautiful, solitary place only seemed to heighten the sense that behind those kind gray eyes lay information that would forever change Michael’s life.” I'm not sure what he meant to accomplish by describing eyes, but it's just something that I noticed a few times through the book. Overall I really enjoyed the book, it was easy to read and was quite hard to put down near the end, with a cliffhanger at the end of nearly every chapter. I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys suspense and figuring out a mystery, don't be intimidated by the financial and accounting side of the book. --Austin
What do You think about The Aspen Account (2012)?
The suspense took me away from my life for the few hours it took to read it. That was a good thing.
—vmacdonald1
Good accounting mystery... What? Yeah, really. With death by skiing! 4 stars for the genre.
—erin
Action packed. Really enjoyed this fast paced novel.
—Ary
